In 1482, Leonardo da Vinci left Florence, where he had begun his career around a decade earlier, and headed for Milan. There, he received a commission for an altarpiece – the Virgin on the Rocks – which he produced with a couple of local artists, brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis. It was while staying with the de Predis family that Leonardo met another artistic son, Cristoforo.

Unlike his brothers, Cristoforo de Predis preferred to work in miniature, and became famous for producing elaborately illuminated books. He was also prelingually deaf. Known by contemporaries as being ‘deaf and dumb’, it meant that he used signs and gestures to communicate – and these made an impression on Leonardo. In notes later published as A Treatise on Painting, he observed how expressive sign language could be, and encouraged artists to study the “motions” of deaf people who “speak with movements of their hands, and eyes, and eyebrows, and their whole person in the desire to express the idea that is in their minds.”

Cristoforo’s career as a deaf painter was unusual, but far from unique in Renaissance Europe. In Rome, another deaf painter named Pinturicchio had recently been working on frescoes for the Sistine Chapel, before later moving on to decorate the Borgia apartments in the Vatican. Originally from Umbria, Italy, he had lost his hearing as a young child and so communicated in signs, sometimes being known as Sordicchio (roughly meaning ‘little deaf man’). As well as high-profile commissions in Rome, Pinturicchio’s career took him to Siena and Perugia.

And neither was the success of deaf artists confined to just Italy. One of the most prominent artists in 16th-century Spain was Juan Fernández Navarrete, who, in 1568, was appointed as the court painter for Philip II and worked on the king’s magnificent palace, El Escorial. Better known as ‘El Mudo’ (‘the Mute’), Navarrete trained in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome and Naples, before returning to Madrid. In the Netherlands, one of the leading artists of landscape painting in the Dutch Golden Age was prelingually deaf: Hendrik Avercamp. Specialising in winter landscapes, he enjoyed enormous success during his lifetime as his pieces were some of the most expensive paintings on sale in Amsterdam.

What made art an attractive career for prelingually deaf people?

In part, it was because it could be taught by sight. Across Europe, prelingually deaf children tended to be steered towards practical trades that they could learn primarily by observation. In early modern England, deaf boys regularly apprenticed as tailors and blacksmiths, but for those from wealthier families, a suitable alternative was to study with an artist. In 1654, William Gaudy – heir to extensive estates in Norfolk – arranged for his eldest son, John, who was deaf, to train with local artist Matthew Snelling.

The rest of the family were sceptical, especially John’s grandfather who was reluctant to cover the cost and argued that since John “was speechless there is no more to be expected from him”. But he was overruled, and John was soon joined by his younger brother Framlingham, who was also deaf. Eventually, the brothers went to London to train in the studios of Sir Peter Lely (by then court painter to King Charles II).

• Read more | What 8 of Charles I’s artworks reveal about the king

Copying was an important element of artistic training during this period; and it was a method of teaching well suited to the Gawdy brothers. Snelling would send the older John pictures to work from, including one of the “Princess Royals” that he himself was “copying to the knees”. At one point, John hit a creative wall while Snelling was away, to which the tutor told John’s father to make him “follow that pattern I set him”, before promising that he had “very fine things for him to draw at my coming hence”.

A major hindrance to prelingually deaf children, and indeed children able to hear, was that the training of an artist was an expensive business. When John moved to London, for example, the Gawdy family paid the modern equivalent of around £17,000 a year for his tutoring, plus accommodation costs. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the deaf artists known to us came from wealthy families. Juan Fernández Navarrete and Hendrik Avercamp both had affluent backgrounds, as did Benjamin Ferrers, a prelingually deaf man who studied at the artistic academy set up by leading portrait painter Godfrey Kneller. Another deaf man, Richard Crosse, attended the Drawing School established by William Shipley in the 1750s, having come from a gentry family in Devon.

Was their art a form of communication?

For some prelingually deaf people, drawing was more than a vocation or even a calling: it was a means of interacting with the hearing world and there are numerous accounts of deaf people expressing themselves through art. One of the most spectacular examples was the work of Luca Riva in 1624. An artist in Milan, he produced his own will through drawing a series of pictures A sketch of a group of men playing cards was a way of explaining that he wished to leave his nephew, a notorious gambler, a small sum of money.

• Read more | A beginner’s guide to art history

Deaf people could use drawing to ease their day-to-day interactions. John Dight, a book binder in 17th-century Exeter, carried a notebook in which he drew pictures when people did not understand his sign language. The younger Gawdy brother, Framlingham, always carried chalks and other drawing equipment to help him communicate. It seems that drawing was also a significant part of deaf education, since notebooks surviving from the 17th and 18th centuries demonstrate how teachers used pictures to help deaf children to learn to read and write.

Throughout the early modern period, there were still doubts about how far prelingually deaf people could be held fully accountable in law, with a widespread perception of them as “infants” as a result of not speaking vocally. Therefore, art became a powerful way for deaf people to demonstrate their capacity for rational thought.

Between 1710 and 1720, Benjamin Ferrers had to fight several court cases in order to claim his inheritance, finally being declared “capable” of managing his affairs in the Court of Chancery. He then appeared in the Court of Common Pleas, where several of his paintings were produced as further evidence that he was of “good understanding”, and so he was allowed to inherit his property. In the following year, Ferrers painted one of his best-known paintings, The Court of Chancery during the reign of George I.

How were such artists received at the time, and what is their legacy today?

There was a belief in Renaissance Europe that prelingually deaf people were actually more likely to be good artists than hearing people, since one of their senses – in this instance, sight – would ‘compensate’ for their lack of hearing. In a poem celebrating Benjamin Ferrers after his death 1732, Vincent Bourne argued that his deafness allowed him to dedicate his whole life to the “silent study of art”. Leonardo da Vinci argued that deaf people could “understand every accident of human bodies better than anyone who can speak and hear”.

• Read more | Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings: a guide to 8 famous works

All of these artists – which account for only a small proportion of the many prelingually deaf artists, recently identified by art historians Angelo lo Conte and Barbara Kaminsky – forged successful careers at a time of artistic innovation. Their works can still be seen in galleries across Europe. They worked as painters, enamellers, sometimes teachers, and their legacy is a permanent record of the contributions that deaf people made to Renaissance culture.

Dr Rosamund Oates is a reader in early modern history at Manchester Metropolitan University, currently working on a history of deafness in England in this period and leading the Cultures of Disability research cluster

This piece was supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Many of the artists discussed have works on display in the Deaf Heritage Centre in Manchester: www.bdhs.org.uk

“I gave and sold myself, of my own free will, as a slave to Elias, son of Blasius of Rastus, for four and a half gold coins, valid until my death, so that the said Elias can do with me as he pleases.”

This record of an exchange – noted on a slip of parchment as having taken place in Dubrovnik in 1281 – is a typical sale contract, reminding us that slavery was a common phenomenon across the Mediterranean and southern Europe in the late medieval period. It makes the horrors of slavery very clear, yet it is also striking to see the “I” of the enslaved person. Despite becoming “property”, their voice resonates across the centuries.

We rightly celebrate the achievements of the Renaissance, but in the late medieval period the Mediterranean was effectively a slaving zone, with enslaved people transported between all of its coasts and sold in its cities, both Muslim and Christian. Those slaves who worked in the households of even prominent humanists tend to get written out of accounts of the Renaissance.

On the podcast | Professor Jerry Brotton responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries about the Renaissance era:

Here, however, I will tell some of the stories of slaves sold in southern Europe. From Dubrovnik in modern-day Croatia around the coast of Italy, the south of France and the coast of Spain up to Porto in Portugal, the archives are full of notarial (legal) contracts about slave sales.

In 1367, a woman named Christine was sold in Marseille; the purchaser told that he could “have her, hold her, give her, sell her, exchange her, and do all that he pleases with her”.

The Italian city of Genoa played a key role in the story of slavery in this period. Genoese merchants took control of the Black Sea port of Caffa (modern-day Feodosia, eastern Crimea) in the late 13th century, and they used it as a slaving hub. They were soon joined by merchants from many other cities.

Enslaved people from a range of regions – Russians, Tatars, Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, Albanians – were sold via Black Sea ports then transported to southern Europe. From 1415, Portuguese expeditions to the west coast of Africa brought more African slaves to be traded. And this story needs to be accompanied by the criss-crossing trade of slaves between north Africa and Europe across the period. In Barcelona, 20 per cent of households had slaves. And in Genoa, it’s thought that female slaves may have made up as much as 10 per cent of their age group. This was not an insignificant phenomenon, in other words.

Certain features stand out: the majority of slaves (though by no means all) in this period were female and young, at least at the point of purchase. And the majority – again, by no means all – of enslaved people, in cities as diverse as Venice, Perpignan and Barcelona, were put to domestic work.

• Read more | Were there slaves in Elizabethan England?

Humanism and human trafficking

This was a period in Italy in which ideas of liberty, the nobility of human nature, and the importance of the common good were discussed in inspirational terms by Renaissance humanists. But these were also societies reliant on human trafficking and slavery.

The hypocrisy is striking, and did not entirely escape contemporaries. The city of Dubrovnik banned slave trading in 1416 as “disgraceful, wicked, an abomination, and against all humanity”. It did not ban slave-owning, however, and traders found loopholes. Alfonso X, king of Castile from 1252–84, passed a code of law known as the Siete Partidas, which expressed disgust at the practice of slave trading. Yet this was also a region in which slaving practices were embedded in social structures.

Most important, though, are the experiences of the enslaved people themselves. We have thousands of contracts of slave sales, as well as documentation from litigation either when owners and traders quibbled, or when enslaved people attempted to challenge their circumstances.

These slaves dealt with their situations with courage and acuity, and it’s vital that we listen to their voices, rather than the disingenuous attempts by those who made their money from them to grapple with their consciences.

Here are four of their stories…

We begin with the story of an enslaved woman from Dubrovnik, known in the Middle Ages as Ragusa. At that time, the city had a high proportion of slaves, some of whom were traded abroad – particularly via Venice, since Dubrovnik was part of the Venetian empire – and some of whom served in Ragusan households.

A slave named Dabraça de Bosna appears in the records in 1282. We can guess that she had been captured in a raid on the hinterlands around Dubrovnik, because her name gives a clue to her origins. And in 1282, de Bosna was able to buy her freedom. Such contracts are not unusual. Through a process known as manumission, many slaves did become free – though the records rarely tell us what happened to them subsequently.

Enslaved people in the period had two routes to freedom. The first was if a master or mistress chose to set free a slave; some owners did so as an act of Christian charity – though more cynical observers pointed out that elderly slaves were hardly worth the upkeep anyway. Some owners also freed slaves in their wills, again in a bid to earn spiritual credit.

The second route was for enslaved people to save up their meagre earnings and buy their freedom. Although slaves were themselves considered in law to be property, a principle of Roman law known as the peculium allowed for them to be paid a pittance that they could save as their own money. Many used such funds to purchase themselves.

• Q&A | Could Roman slaves buy their own freedom?

The fact that there were potential routes to freedom does not undermine the sheer horror of slavery, but it does show us the ways in which enslaved people tried to manage their own situations.

De Bosna, however, had not saved up enough to purchase her own freedom, so instead sold her sister. At that point, according to the manumission document, de Bosna became free to “wander through the four corners of the Earth, wherever it should please her, free and liberated for ever”. In return, her sister was given to the master to “serve her owner in all ways according to his wishes”, a particularly ominous phrase.

But there was a catch: the sister was sold for only four years, after which she was free to go. One wonders about the two siblings’ relationship: was this a case of betrayal, or a powerful emotive bond driving these sisters to support one another even in these terrible circumstances? Either way, de Bosna’s management of her own fate is striking.

Family bonds are evident in so many of these stories. Enslaved people were brutally taken from their homes and severed from their local communities. Yet they still found ways to maintain a sense of family.

The domestic slavery of women often included a sexual element, and many enslaved women became pregnant by their masters. In medieval Roman law, canon law (the law of the church) and civic statutes, the offspring of slaves were supposed to inherit the unfree status of their mothers. Thus a Marseillais noble named Pascal de Galdis was able to buy a pregnant slave and her four-year-old son, in 1465, and then sell the child three years later.

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Some enslaved women found ways to contest this cruelty. One was Theodora, who lived in Crete and had two sons – Dimitrios and Andronicos – by her owner, Pietro Porco. In 1345, Porco decided that he wanted to sell the boys; he claimed this was his legal right, because they had inherited the enslaved status of their mother.

However, the magistrates of Crete – which at the time was a Venetian colony known as the kingdom of Candia – forbade the sale, noting that “[the children] are and will remain forever free”.

Another woman living in Crete, a free sex-worker named Maria, was told that she would have to give up her child because the father was a slave. But Maria managed to use the law to her advantage, taking the case to court to argue that the child should inherit her free status. She won her case.

This legal and social ambivalence, and stories of mothers standing up for their children, can be found in various Italian cities. But they are tempered by the heart-rending tales of children who were separated from their mothers at a young age. In 1377, for instance, a woman from Marseille sold her slave – but kept the enslaved woman’s one-year-old son for herself.

These are stories of slaves who knew how to use the law. Extraordinarily, they were able to litigate, and the complexity of legal and cultural attitudes occasionally worked in their favour. Sometimes, enslaved people were able to exploit the hypocrisies at the heart of Christian society.

A trio of teenage girls – Grlica, Stojana and Tvrdislava – who were enslaved in Bosnia in 1393 provide one such extraordinary story. According to the slave trader, the three teenagers were patarenes – members of a heretical sect in Bosnia. This was an important distinction, because the canon law of the Catholic church grappled with the ethics of enslaving other Christians.

Many slaves converted to Christianity during the late Middle Ages, presenting the church authorities with a problem. They did not want enslaved people to become free by converting, because they worried that owners might then be discouraged from allowing their slaves to convert.

But the church had also decided that enslaving Christians was wrong. So canon law alighted on a compromise, decreeing that the moment of conversion was crucial. If a slave had converted before they were enslaved, the enslavement was invalidated. If, however, they converted after they’d been enslaved, there was apparently no problem.

So how did all this apply to Grlica, Stojana and Tvrdislava? These three girls found the remarkable strength to state publicly that they had converted to Christianity before being enslaved. Extraordinarily, they won their case, and the trader was forced to release them – much to his fury.

Some of these stories are, on the face of it, uplifting – but enslaved people worked so hard to contest their situations precisely because slavery was so horrific. This point is made most powerfully by the stories of slaves who attempted to escape. Enslaved people who tried to flee were usually captured and punished; this process generated documentation, so we know something of their stories.

One such case is that of Antoine Simon, a black slave who worked in Barcelona in the 1440s. Escaping from his owner, a prominent trader named Pons Ferrer, Antoine crossed the Pyrenees – a journey that must have been terrifying. Somehow he knew to aim for the town of Pamiers, in the south of France, where slavery was against the law. There Simon found employment with one Pierre Toc, who worked for the region’s count.

Ferrer was furious, and pursued Simon to Pamiers. Upon arrival, he took legal action against both Simon and Toc, accusing the former of theft: since Simon was Ferrer’s property, Simon had, in effect, robbed himself from Ferrer. Both men were summoned before the court, where Simon argued that his freedom was sacrosanct according to the law of his new home. Toc reiterated that argument, and stressed his right to employ Simon as a free man.

What clinched the outcome, however, was the determination of the town’s officials to stress their own independence: it was part of their civic identity to defend the liberty of Pamier’s inhabitants. Simon lived the rest of his life a free man.

On the podcast | Padraic X Scanlan discusses how slavery fuelled the British empire and explores the complicated motivations of abolitionists in an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

Most enslaved people, of course, never managed to escape, and draconian punishments were imposed on those who tried. But Simon’s story is testament to the possibility, and to his understanding of how he might secure his freedom.

His story is also testament to Pamier’s determination to protect its inhabitants’ freedom. Many urban centres adopted similar policies: notably, Toulouse welcomed a number of fugitives from slavery, and some other towns where slavery remained common nevertheless expressed anxiety about the morality of the practice.

However, in many respects the groundwork was laid in this period for the development of the transatlantic slave trade in subsequent centuries. The religious justifications were in place, and the economic advantages and legal frameworks for rendering humans as property were set out, even if slavery in the late medieval period was not yet fully racialised.

Despite this, enslaved people like Simon remained irreducibly human: courageous, canny and determined – ironically, the very qualities articulated by the Renaissance humanists we continue to celebrate today.

Hannah Skoda is Fellow and Tutor in Medieval History at St John’s College, Oxford. She works on the social and cultural history of the later Middle Ages, and has authored Medieval Violence (OUP, 2012) and co-edited two volumes on Legalism (OUP, 2012 and 2017)

At a modest 86cm by 60cm, The Arnolfini Portrait – as it is commonly known – is far from the National Gallery’s largest painting, but it is certainly one of its most intriguing. Not for nothing has it been described as one of the greatest examples of Early Northern Renaissance art.

On first glance, the painting – oil on wood – appears to depict a wealthy couple in a domestic setting, the bed perhaps indicating that they are in a bedchamber. End of story? Far from it, says Dr Emma Capron, associate curator of Renaissance painting at the National Gallery, London.

Watch: Secrets of The Arnolfini Portrait

“The Arnolfini Portrait is completely unique,” says Capron. “There is nothing else like it that has survived in 15th-century art. For a long time, it was thought to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini. But more recently, art historian Lorne Campbell has argued that the figures are more likely to be his merchant cousin, Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his second wife, whose identity is unknown. They all resided in Bruges.”

The pose of the woman as she deliberately clutches her voluminous green gown to her stomach has led many to conclude that she is pregnant, while the couple’s joined hands could indicate that this is, in fact, a wedding portrait. Indeed, the artist’s flourishing signature above the mirror – Johannes de eyck fuit hic (Jan van Eyck was here) – has been interpreted by some as the artist bearing witness to the nuptials.

“The pregnancy theory was popular for a long time,” comments Capron. “But her pose actually has more to do with showing off the rich fabric of her gown, and ideas of female beauty at the time. Women with prominent stomachs had a strong visual appeal in the 15th century, and these were sartorially emphasised with high belts and folds of fabric. By lifting her gown, she reveals the expensive fur lining beneath – possibly ermine or miniver (squirrel fur) – which is depicted in a white that would have been nearly impossible to achieve in real life. The focus on her stomach does relate to fertility, but it is more a demonstration of fecundity and an ability to produce an heir rather than evidence of pregnancy.”

• READ MORE | A beginner’s guide to art history

Historically, much has been read into the other objects carefully strewn around the room. In the 1930s, art historian Erwin Panofsky used the painting as a basis for his theory of ‘disguised symbolism’, whereby each object has a hidden meaning. Paintings, he believed, could be decoded and deciphered: the oranges on the table represented original sin, for example, while the presence of the dog at the woman’s feet could be read as a symbol of her fidelity to her husband.

“Panofsky’s theories are very seductive,” says Capron, “and he, too, also argued that the painting was a form of marriage contract. But his ideas are not always grounded in fact. Once we begin to unpick the realism of the painting, it becomes clear that what Van Eyck has done is create an illusion of reality; something to be enjoyed for its exquisite detail rather than its hidden mysteries.

“The portrait is a carefully constructed reality – a figment of Van Eyck’s imagination and a product of his incredible brush and powers of observation. His elaborate signature, ‘Jan van Eyck was here’, in this context calls us back to that fact that, as a place only he has visualised, he is the only one who has ever been in this room.”

The Arnolfini Portrait hangs in Room 63 at the National Gallery in London. Visit the website for more information on the painting

This article was first published in the Christmas 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed 

When news that the Holy League had been victorious in the battle of Lepanto spread around Europe, it was followed by jubilant celebrations. The loose alliance of Catholic forces from Spain, the Venetian Republic and other Italian states had confronted and defeated a larger fleet from the Ottoman empire in the Gulf of Patras on 7 October 1571, not long after the latter had invaded Cyprus.

King Philip II of Spain’s chief minister hailed it as “the greatest naval victory since Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea”. The pope, Pius V, instituted a new feast day to Our Lady of Victory and numerous paintings and poems were created to honour the battle. European nations had long lived under the looming shadow of Ottoman militarism, but Lepanto demonstrated that the empire was not invincible.

The symbolism of the victory was writ large: in this clash of civilisations, Christian (specifically, Catholic) Europe had come out on top.

Europe under threat

The Ottomans, led by Sultan Selim II since 1566, had invaded Cyprus in 1570 as part of their ongoing attempts at expansion. If the growth of the empire continued to go unchecked, some people believed that it could pose a threat to the security of Europe, which faced deep religious divisions at a time that saw both Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

• On the podcast | Everything you wanted to know about the Ottoman empire

“When the Ottomans captured Nicosia on Cyprus in 1570, and Famagusta the following year, a Christian alliance of Venice [which held the island], Spain, the Knights Hospitaller and the pope sent a navy to stop the advance,” explains Marc David Baer, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs (Basic Books, 2021). “The Holy League wiped out the enemy fleet, sinking almost all of their ships and killing thousands of soldiers. It was one of the Mediterranean’s largest-ever naval battles.”

But while Lepanto is often remembered as the moment that Ottoman expansion stalled, the battle was more a “temporary morale booster for the Catholic west”, says Baer, and had limited impact in the short term. Indeed, within a year, the Ottomans had rebuilt their fleet – adding a number of floating fortresses or ‘galleasses’ that the Holy League used to great effect at Lepanto – and resumed their campaigning in the Mediterranean. To make matters worse for the Europeans, Pius V succumbed to illness, and the quarrelling that beset the Holy League from its formation continued.

• Read more | The Ottoman forces’ clash with Christians at the battle of Lepanto

As the empire’s grand vizier reportedly declared to a diplomat: “[You] shaved our beard, but it will grow again; we have cut off your arm, and you will never find another.”

In 1573, the Venetians surrendered Cyprus anyway, and the Ottomans conquered Tunis the following year. “By the end of the 16th century, most of north Africa’s coast was under nominal Ottoman control,” asserts Baer.

Woefully outgunned

If losing at Lepanto was only a temporary setback for the Ottoman empire, there is an argument that winning the battle would not have led to substantial differences. “Win or lose, the Ottomans reached stunning heights of global political power and prosperity due to their other naval exploits from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean,” says Baer.

>The Ottomans had the larger fleet on 7 October, and only lost because of the destructive firepower of the Holy League, commanded by Don John of Austria, illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and half-brother of Spain’s Philip II. To have won, claims Baer, the Ottomans would have needed “hundreds of armed warships and large galleys fitted out with enormous cannons, like the Holy League possessed”.

• Read more | What make the Holy Roman Empire ‘holy’?

But while a different result may not have drastically altered the trajectory of the Ottomans, it would have been disastrous for much of Europe nevertheless. The battle was never regarded at the time as ‘Christians v Muslims’; the Protestants – at war with their Catholic neighbours – would have been happy to see the Ottomans victorious. And if that were the case, it would have crushed Catholic morale.

“The Ottomans, allied with Morocco, England and the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands, could have made even more inroads into southern Europe,” explains Baer.

There is another clash, however, between Catholic European forces and the Ottomans that could have been far more significant than Lepanto had the result gone a different way: the great siege of Malta in 1565. Had the Ottomans succeeded in conquering the island, says Baer, they would have been able to seize control of the western Mediterranean, having already gained possession of Rhodes in 1522 and later gone on to take Cyprus.

“The Ottomans may have slowed down the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World, and perhaps even defeated the Habsburgs. And if they used Malta as a springboard to gain more territories in southern Europe and conquer Italy, or at least Rome, they would have achieved their ultimate ideological goal: to unite east and west under one dynasty and one religion.”

This content first appeared in the April 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

Many strange stories of melancholy caught the eye of Robert Burton, an Oxford scholar who dedicated most of his life to writing The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). First printed 400 years ago, it is a vast compendium of melancholy that is also a literary masterpiece.

Burton defined melancholy as a type of “dotage” or mental instability typically accompanied by sorrow and fear. Nowadays we associate the term with a state of dejection, pensiveness, or even depression, but for more than 2,000 years, melancholy has encompassed much more.

One such story that was included in Burton’s book was that of the non-urinating Italian man – a case study that might surprise modern readers. The 16th-century writer André du Laurens, physician to King Henri IV of France, records what happened: the patient told his doctors that he would rather die than go to the toilet because, if he relieved himself, he would drown his home city of Siena.

At first the patient’s physicians tried to reason with him. They pointed out that the cubic capacity of his bladder was hardly equal to the task of submerging a whole city. Even 10,000 people, they said, would not be able to flood a single house. But the gentleman would not be convinced.

Seeing that his life was now in danger, the doctors hit on a novel treatment – if an extreme one. Rather than trying to persuade him through logic, instead they entered into his delusory state. They started a fire in the house next door and triggered Siena’s fire alarm system – the ringing of church bells. The servants became bit-part actors in the drama, shouting out: “To the fire, to the fire!” Then the civic worthies came to visit the patient. They pleaded with him for help: there was only one way to save the town, and that was if he urinated and put out the fire.

So this melancholic man realised the danger and stepped up to the challenge of being Siena’s first human fire hose. As he relieved his bladder, he was instantly cured. The doctors’ unusual treatment succeeded, its elaborate and even theatrical method enabling their patient to live out his false belief and – quite literally – flush it out of his system.

What was Robert Burton’s definition of melancholy?

During the 16th and 17th centuries – the cultural high-water mark of melancholy – the condition was seen as slippery, infinitely varied in its manifestations, and nearly impossible to categorise.

Burton says of sufferers that there are “scarce two of two thousand that concur in the same symptoms. The tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as the chaos of melancholy doth variety of symptoms.” While one patient feared urinating, another was convinced he was made of glass; one thought he had a giant head; another that he was a cockerel.

Some melancholics succumbed to despair and met a violent end; others simply wasted away with shame or embarrassment. Burton doggedly attempted to document all the cases he read, comparing himself to a “ranging spaniel” who picked up a scent and pursued it to its end.

Scratching the itch

Why did Burton devote himself to chronicling this condition? He observed that he suffered from melancholy himself and was driven to write about it as a form of self-therapy, or even as a symptom: “One must scratch where it itcheth,” he said. That claim is borne out by the history of his book. After the Anatomy was first published in 1621, five more editions appeared, each enlarged with new stories of melancholy he had found through his omnivorous reading from the shelves of Renaissance learning: medicine, history, philosophy, theology and literature. In 1651, 11 years after Burton’s death, his publishers printed the sixth edition of the Anatomy, now grown to more than half a million words.

Why were people fascinated by melancholy?

The Anatomy clearly captured the imagination of English Renaissance readers. But what was it that made its subject so appealing? A major reason is that melancholy was seen as a fashionable ailment. From ancient Greece onwards, the condition was associated not only with sadness and fear, but also with intellectual and creative genius. The pseudo-Aristotelian Problems asked the question: “Why is it that all those men who have become extraordinary in philosophy, politics, poetry or the arts are obviously melancholic…?”

In the late 15th century, the Italian Neoplatonist scholar Marsilio Ficino argued that melancholy was the companion of scholarly introspection. Drawing on astrological theory, he claimed that Saturn cast its influence over deep thinkers, bringing contemplative wisdom but also a kind of holy madness. This brand of melancholy gave a dark glamour to the condition: it was a source of inspiration to artists and writers, while young gentlemen of the Tudor period fashioned themselves – like Hamlet – as lone, pensive figures, wearing black. Put simply, it looked good to be melancholy.

• Read more | Can the work of a 17th-century scholar help us understand mental illness?

Bewitching thoughts

Yet being melancholy was far from a safe occupation, as Burton knew all too well. He describes it as like a Siren, that mythical creature who lured sailors to their watery deaths through her sweet singing. Melancholy can start out pleasantly enough: a person might want to spend time in solitary contemplation, wandering alone in woods or down by the river. “A most incomparable delight it is so to melancholise, and build castles in the air,” he comments. Though seemingly innocent, this behaviour starts to intrude on everything, until the person experiencing it can no longer control it: “These fantastical and bewitching thoughts so covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually set upon, creep in, insinuate, possess, overcome, distract, and detain them, they cannot, I say, go about their more necessary business, stave off or extricate themselves, but are ever musing, melancholising, and carried along.” Burton’s language hints at the experience he is describing: each word spills into the next one, just as “bewitching thoughts” crowd into the sufferer’s mind.

Pleasurable or “sweet” melancholy isonly one side of the coin. On the other is anguish, desperation, inescapable sorrow and terror. Burton charts the many variations of this dangerous illness in his book, through the stories of those who suffered from it as well as the prescriptions given by Renaissance physicians. The Anatomy of Melancholy takes its subject seriously: Burton ambitiously attempts to delineate the wide contours of mental suffering, as they had been understood from antiquity up to the 17th century.

The etymology of melancholy and the theory of ‘black bile’

Melancholy is a mental disorder that, writes Burton, is rooted in the body. The term literally means “black bile”, one of the four humours of the human body, according to ancient Greek physiology. In humoral theory, blood is hot and wet, yellow bile (or choler) is hot and dry, phlegm is cold and wet, and black bile (or melancholy) is cold and dry. These four humours are essential for living, and a healthy person maintains them in a perfect balance. But most people have a predominance of one humour, which influences not only their physical health but also their personality. As people get older, they lose some of their natural heat and moisture. This means that, while young people might be prone to the anger and passionate moods triggered by choler, older people are less hot-tempered but also tend to be more melancholic: sad, solitary and timorous.

It is not simply an excess of black bile that causes melancholy: all of the humours, on their own or in combination, can cause the condition. As Galenic medical theory
(so named after the ancient Greek physician Aelius Galenus) explains it, this is because the humours can become corrupted or burnt through sickness or bad living, producing vapours that travel to the brain and affect the imagination. This can then produce different varieties of melancholy, corresponding to the original humour. For example, while a sanguine person – someone whose humoral complexion is dominated by blood – is characteristically cheerful, a sanguine melancholic is unable to restrain his hilarity.

Such was the case of a man called Brunsellius, who, Burton tells us, was sitting at church one day when a woman fell asleep during a sermon and fell off a bench. While most of the people who saw it laughed, the sanguine melancholic Brunsellius was so overcome that “for three whole days after he did nothing but laugh, by which means he was much weakened”.

Too much “chamber-work”

Behaviour and habits could alter the “complexion” or balance of humours in the body, especially anything that used up the body’s heat and moisture – such as through sweating or riotous living. In extreme cases, this could lead not just to melancholy but to outright madness. For instance, Burton charts the case of a man in Italy who “married a young wife in a hot summer, and so dried himself with chamber-work, that he became in short space from melancholy, mad”. The older man’s lust affected not only his body, but also his state of mind.

Just as too much sex could cause melancholy, so could other kinds of excess. Burton tells the cautionary tale of a group of young men in Agrigento in Sicily who spent a long session drinking in a tavern, until they became convinced they were in a ship during a storm. To prevent shipwreck, they started to throw the furniture out of the tavern’s windows into “the sea”. Hauled before the magistrate, they knelt before him as a sea god, beseeching him to be merciful to them in return for which they would build him an altar when they reached land.

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Among the reasons why The Anatomy of Melancholy has proven popular is that Burton’s advice for dealing with this pervasive condition is often wise and humane. He may be distilling hundreds of years’ worth of learned medical theory, but he also tells his readers simple things like “hope the best” and – his very last piece of advice in the book – “be not solitary, be not idle”. While the Anatomy is a huge and unwieldy self-help book, it is also practical. Burton wants his readers to get better, not to be gripped by the sufferings of a condition that he himself knows well.

The legacy of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy

In the 400 years since the Anatomy’s first appearance, readers have been puzzled, entertained, frustrated and absorbed by Burton’s book and the disease at its centre. It has provided inspiration for Romantic poets, source material for novelists from Laurence Sterne to George Eliot to Philip Pullman, and a rich diversion for many.

The Anatomy’s subject may have slipped from official diagnoses of mental health conditions, but melancholy still resonates in our own time. Perhaps what we can learn most from the way Burton and his Renaissance contemporaries treated this condition is its all-encompassing nature. Ranging through so many different symptoms – from sadness and terror to delusion, from despondency to wild exuberance – melancholy stands as a marker for the breadth of human fragility to which everyone was and is susceptible.

For Burton and his Renaissance contemporaries, melancholy revealed how people’s bodies, minds and spirits were intimately interlinked, so much so that grief could show itself in a skin rash, or a physical sickness in an unshakeable low mood. As Burton concludes – though far from hopelessly – melancholy touches us all, for it is no more or less than “the character of mortality”.

Dr Mary Ann Lund is associate professor of Renaissance English literature at the University of Leicester. She is the author of A User’s Guide to Melancholy (Cambridge, February 2021). BBC Radio Four’s The New Anatomy of Melancholy is available on BBC iPlayer

This article was first published in the December 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

What image comes to mind when you hear the word ‘mermaid’? For many people, it will be Ariel, the redheaded Disney princess who trades her tail for legs and her voice for a chance to win herself a life on land. For others, the word will conjure the wan heroine of Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairytale who, unlike her Disney counterpart, is rejected by her prince and dissolves into sea foam, losing the chance to gain an immortal soul.

It’s largely thanks to the popularity of Andersen’s fairytale that mermaids have become standardised in the west over the past two centuries. Like Ariel, they are depicted as hybrid creatures, with the torso and head of a beautiful woman and the tail of a fish. They often carry a mirror and a comb, and have the speech and personality of a human woman.

However, the history of the mermaid myth, and its many manifestations across the globe, reveals a far more complex picture. Mermaids transform depending on which seas we find them in. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes monstrous, sometimes seductive, sometimes maternal – and oftentimes all of these at once – these enchanting entities can be a far cry from the tragic victim of Andersen’s influential tale.

Mermaids, regardless of where they call home, are persistently contradictory, ambivalent and powerful figures, used to represent the unknown and the undiscovered.

Were mermaids and sirens one and the same?

The origins of mermaids are difficult to trace. While some cultural historians believe that fish goddesses in early religions were their ancestors, others consider sirens to be the first models for mermaids. Made famous by Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey, sirens are bird-woman hybrids who lure sailors to their deaths through song and who may eat the flesh of men who do not please them sexually.

In the 13th century, writer Richard de Fournival recorded three kinds of sirens, two of which are actually half woman and half fish. This helps to explain why sirens and mermaids became interchangeable in Renaissance Europe. Both were consistently associated with fertility, seduction and the dangers of sexual encounter – and people really did believe in their existence.

Tales of mermaids and sirens were spread by travellers from sea to land, and sightings are recorded by sailors from the Middle Ages right through to the 18th century. In 1608, explorer Henry Hudson wrote that on one morning “one of our companie looking over board saw a mermaid”, reportedly with the tail of a porpoise and long dark hair.

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In 1493, near the Rio del Oro (on what is present day Haiti) Christopher Columbus recorded a disappointing encounter with three sirens, describing them as “not so beautiful as they are painted, though to some extent they have the form of a human face”.

According to legend, sirens haunt Haitian waters to this very day. Lasirèn, a beautiful woman with a fish tail, is a Haitian spirit summoned by the blowing of a conch. A symbol of wealth and seduction, she bestows prosperity on those she favours, but angers easily. Carrying a mirror to represent the portal between the human and mystical worlds, she might visit you in a dream and take you down to her underwater realm, to teach you sacred secrets.

Folktales and Victorian freak shows

During the Renaissance, cosmographers often marked unexplored waters with the phrase Hic sunt sirenae – here be sirens/mermaids. As mermaids often represent the mysterious unknown, it is unsurprising that anyone who managed to get their hands on one was eager to show it off, and to turn the public’s fascination to their own financial gain.

One of the most famous examples of this phenomenon is the Feejee Mermaid, which made its way from Nagasaki to London in 1822.

In Japan, instead of mermaids an explorer might find ningyo. Literally translated as ‘human fish’, these are more varied, and often more monstrous, than European mermaids. All have fish bodies, but some have a horned human head, others a monkey-like head or a scaled face.

According to legend, eating the flesh of these creatures will elongate the life of the consumer. The folktale Yao Bikuni tells of a young girl who does just that, and becomes immortal. After outliving several husbands she seeks solace in a convent, but suffers so much ennui that she eventually takes her own life.

Another tells of a fisherman who manages to catch a ningyo and feeds its flesh to his children. However, instead of gaining eternal youth, they immediately grow scales and die. Both tales warn us that encounters with Japanese mermaids might have devastating consequences.

In 1854, when Japan opened more widely to trade, exportation of ningyo to sideshows in America and Europe, where they were rebranded as mermaids, became a prosperous business.

Captain Samuel Barrett Eades bought one from Dutch sailors, for a vast sum of money. He seems to have been convinced that his Feejee Mermaid, with the head of a monkey, the bottom of a fish and a face contorted in pain and terror, was not only worth the expense, but real – despite the expert opinion of various naturalists who deemed it a fabrication.

The advertisement for its London exhibition declared Eades’ mermaid “The wonder of the World, the admiration of all ages, the theme of the Philosopher, the Historian, and the Poet”. Apparently, the general public were as convinced as Eades, or at least very curious: the Mirror estimated that 3,000- 4,000 people per day paid their shilling to visit the mermaid.

Eventually, as new marvels were brought to shore by other explorers, interest in the Feejee Mermaid waned and the exhibition shut down. It eventually ended up in the hands of ‘greatest showman’ PT Barnum, who successfully toured the creature around America.

The mermaids of Africa

Rivers, lakes and seas have been crucial historically in African regions for trade, food, communication and transport. However, bodies of water also have far darker associations due to the Transatlantic slave trade, which transported millions of enslaved people across the Atlantic, a journey during which many died.

African mermaid lore therefore represents both the dominance and ambivalence of water in the continent’s culture. Water spirits, which had long been honoured and celebrated in Africa, become entangled with European iconography of mermaids from the 15th century onwards, as Euro-African contacts increased.

In the Yoruba tradition, saints and spirits called orishas are sent by Olodumare, the origin of virtue and morality, to rule the forces of nature. The orisha Yemonja is mother of the oceans and is often visualised as a siren or mermaid – a beautiful woman with the tail of a fish – holding a conch shell. Temperamental and associated with fertility, Yemonja is worshiped as a protector of women and children and a champion for justice. She increased in prominence in the Caribbean and Americas when enslaved survivors of the Middle Passage began petitioning her for alleviation of their suffering.

Another Yoruba water deity is Oshun. Goddess of sensuality and fertility, she reigns over the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Nigeria. Folktales describe her spiteful temper and the sinister smile she reserves for those who have wronged her.

During the 20th century, local water goddesses became increasingly homogenised under the general name of Mami Wata, pidgin English for ‘Mother Water’. While her name seems to have emerged with the slave trade, the concept of Mami Wata can be traced right back to the earlier African orishas and other indigenous water spirits.

A powerful and contradictory figure, she is always attractive, with the torso of a woman and the bottom half of a fish tail, often accompanied by a snake. While she is known to be seductive and dangerous, Mami Wata is also associated with fertility (although, ironically, it is believed that her followers can’t bear children).

A liaison with Mami Wata often requires a significant sacrifice – perhaps celibacy, or even the life of a family member – but she can bestow great wealth in exchange; known as a “capitalist” deity, she is materialistic and associated with social mobility.

Mami Wata is traditionally worshipped in trance dances, a practice that slave owners tried to curb. A symbol of female liberation and empowerment, the deity allows women to become powerful priestesses and healers in return for their devotion.

Mermaids, from the waters of Haiti to the sacred groves of Nigeria, continue to seduce us. Disney’s The Little Mermaid is about to get a live-action reboot, Beyoncé dressed up as Oshun in her music video for the single ‘Hold Up’, and Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch was awarded Costa Book of the Year for 2020.

Mysterious and powerful, forces for destruction and protection, mermaids not only hold up a mirror to the mystical, the supernatural and the unknown, but also to our own societies – and to ourselves.

This article was first published in the May 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed 

In the latest episode in our series on history’s biggest topics, Professor Jill Burke tackles listener questions and internet search queries on the Borgias, from rumours of incest and the Banquet of the Chestnuts to the forgotten triumphs Pope Alexander VI.

Among the Medici, the great banking family that counted popes among its clients and came to be de facto rulers (and later dukes) of Florence, one name tends to loom large over all others: Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Born on 1 January 1449 to Piero de’ Medici and Lucrezia Tornabuoni, he would become one of greatest figures of the Renaissance – a masterful politician and diplomat. But he was also a renowned patron of the arts, who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo, and an accomplished poet in his own right. He would become an exemplar of the ‘merchant prince’ – though for all this, his rule and life were not without their challenges.

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s early life

When Lorenzo de’ Medici was born in 1449, his family were enjoying an enviable position at the head of government in Florence. In the 15 years since he had returned from exile, his grandfather, Cosimo de’ Medici, had rebuilt their power by securing alliances with other city families through marriages like that of Lorenzo’s father to Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Following Cosimo’s death in 1464, the mantle of rulership fell to his son, Piero de’ Medici.

In the brief, five-year period of his rule, Piero commissioned a spectacular fresco series from Benozzo Gozzoli for the chapel of the family palazzo, showing the procession of the Magi. The image of the youngest king, Caspar, is sometimes said to represent Lorenzo, although a more obvious portrait of the boy, along with many other images of family members, appears elsewhere in the procession.

When Piero died in 1469, the 20-year-old Lorenzo was left to lead the city. He had been well prepared. He had the traditional training of a ‘Renaissance man’ in the humanities and arts, from tutors including the leading philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Lorenzo was a talented poet, and acquired the accomplishments expected of any young prince in hunting, jousting and hawking.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, banker and ruler of Florence

His marriage alliance was also a princely one. Lorenzo was the first of the Medici to marry out of Florence, to Clarice Orsini, a member of an important Roman baronial family. It was an indication that the family’s ambitions were no longer confined to just one city.

These alliances mattered, because the Medicis were increasingly dependent on their political power and the income they accrued from the Florentine state, both directly as officeholders and indirectly via patronage of contracts. The family bank was faltering. After the default of Edward IV of England in 1478, first its London and then its Bruges and Milan branches had foundered, their problems exacerbated by mismanagement. The problems spread; Lorenzo alienated his own relatives in the cadet branch [a junior line] of the family (descendants of Cosimo the Elder’s brother, another Lorenzo) by helping himself to money held for them in trust.

The Medici had tried to circumvent the usual structures of government, ruling by means of emergency committees packed with allies, and pre-selecting election candidates. But there was ample opposition to these tactics in the city, from both rival oligarchs and the lower classes. The Medici had also alienated Pope Sixtus IV.

The Pazzi Conspiracy

This would lead to the events of 26 April 1478. In what became known as the Pazzi Conspiracy, assassins succeeded in murdering Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano while the pair were attending mass in Florence’s cathedral.

The backdrop to the conspiracy was a row over the town of Imola, which enjoyed a strategic location on the road between Florence and the Adriatic ports. The Duke of Milan had agreed to sell it to Lorenzo, but he reneged on the agreement and decided to sell it to the Pope instead, part of a deal in which their daughter and nephew would marry. Lorenzo, who was still papal banker, refused to finance the purchase. Sixtus sacked the Medici Bank and looked to alternative lenders, including the Pazzi family.

While Lorenzo escaped the killers, there were hard political consequences. The Pazzi Conspiracy threatened to destabilise the entire Italian peninsula, which had been at an uneasy peace for the best part of two decades following the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

As the Medici pursued the conspirators – including Francesco Salviati, archbishop of Pisa – the pope moved against the Medici. There was a real prospect of war, only avoided by an impressive piece of personal diplomacy in which Lorenzo effectively made himself a hostage of King Ferrante of Naples, persuaded the king into an alliance and, eventually, in March 1480, returned to Florence and to power.

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Lorenzo de’ Medici’s family

Lorenzo continued the pattern established by his own marriage with those of his children: his son Piero would wed Alfonsina Orsini of Naples; his daughter Maddalena married an illegitimate son of Sixtus’s successor, Pope Innocent VIII. In 1489 Lorenzo’s son Giovanni became a cardinal, establishing a family foothold in the Church. Giovanni was only 13, well below the age at which such a promotion was normally permitted, and the appointment is testament to Lorenzo’s success in rebuilding his influence.

Lorenzo’s letter to his son on his appointment gives an insight into his expectation that Giovanni should live modestly: “Your taste will be better shown in the acquisition of a few elegant remains of antiquity, or in the collecting of handsome books, and by your attendants being learned and well-bred rather than numerous.” And while the new cardinal should “aim at being a good ecclesiastic”, he should not find it difficult to “favour your family and your native place”, though of course he should always “prefer the interests of the Church”. Lorenzo did not know it, but that promotion would prove vital to securing the family’s position.

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Lorenzo de’ Medici’s influence on the Renaissance

The legacy that is most familiar today is one of patronage. Lorenzo’s Florence was the city of artists like Leonardo da Vinci, three years Lorenzo’s junior, who joined the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio in the mid 1460s. When Botticelli was commissioned to paint an ‘Adoration of the Magi’ for the chapel of the del Lama family in Santa Maria Novella, he painted in the Medici as the three kings and two onlookers. In fact, it was Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano who patronised Botticelli more than Lorenzo, and after Giuliano’s assassination Botticelli painted a public mural of the traitors.

Late in Lorenzo’s life the young Michelangelo (born in 1475) joined the group of artists who met in the sculpture garden of the Palazzo Medici, where they were able to study Lorenzo’s collection of art and antiquities. Michelangelo produced his ‘Battle of the Centaurs’ and ‘Madonna of the Stairs’ during this time.

Lorenzo’s personal legacy also included his library, and the collection of country villas that now dotted the hillsides around Florence. It was at the villa in Careggi where he died on 8 April 1492, regretting that his library was still not finished. He might have been satisfied to know that it survives, more than 500 years on.

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Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death: why is he known as ‘Il Magnifico’?

Lorenzo de’ Medici’s death on 8 April 1492 is often seen as the end of an era: he was only 43 but was suffering from the hereditary gout that afflicted his family. He died two years before the outbreak of war and the exile of the Medici.

Some decades later, the great historian of Italy, Francesco Guicciardini, described his death as “a grievous stroke to his country”. Lorenzo’s “reputation, prudence and genius” had helped maintain a “long and secure peace” in Italy. “If Florence was to have a tyrant,” Guicciardini wrote, “she could never have found a better or more delightful one.”

A portion of Lorenzo’s legacy, however, lay in the future. Precisely because he was not an aristocrat, he became an important model in the 18th and 19th century for a new class of ‘merchant princes’. These men had made their money from trade and industry but were not titled lords.

Often looked down upon by the traditional ruling class, they could point to the role of their Medici forerunners as patrons of some of the west’s greatest artists. In the modern world, the Medici became a model for philanthropy – even if that meant overlooking some of the more dubious means by which they had acquired their wealth and their power.

Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Her latest book is The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020). You can also listen to her discuss the Medici in more detail in this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast

This content was published by HistoryExtra in 2021

In the 15th century, the Medici of Florence made a banking fortune. They survived both business crisis and exile. Thanks to their power in the church – Medici popes ruled for almost 20 years – they succeeded in establishing themselves as dukes of their home city. The first duke’s half-sister became the queen of France, one of two Medici women to hold that title. It was a stellar – if sometimes brutal – rise. But how did they do it?

Cosimo de’ Medici (later known as Cosimo the Elder) was, according to Pope Pius II, “king in all but name” of Florence. This was not entirely a compliment: like Pius’s home city of Siena (a Tuscan rival), Florence was a republic; it should not have had a king. Cosimo was a banker, not a prince, though even Pius had to concede that Cosimo was “more cultured than merchants usually are”.

Cosimo’s father, Giovanni, had made his money from the wool trade and banking. At the crossroads of the Mediterranean, linking the Silk Roads to the east with the routes to northern Europe, Italy was one of the wealthiest parts of the continent. The Medici were bankers to the popes, a lucrative business, and in their home city they built an alliance with a group of prominent families (often cemented by marriages) that gave them control of the city authorities.

Masters of Florence

Florence was not a democracy in the modern sense, but its ruling councils were elected by a limited male elite. Wives could and did exercise informal influence, although they were expected to maintain a demure public profile.

The Medici did not always get their way. In 1433, opponents contrived to have Cosimo arrested, but as banker to the Republic of Venice and the duke of Ferrara he had influential friends. He evaded execution and was exiled instead, albeit not for long; when his supporters won elections the following year, Cosimo returned to power. He used his wealth to patronise art, architecture and cultural projects, commissioning a new palace for the family, bronze sculptures by Donatello and enabling the completion of the dome for the city’s cathedral to the design of Filippo Brunelleschi.

After Cosimo’s death in 1464, his son Piero de’ Medici (Piero the Gouty) became head of the family. He survived an attempted coup but died in 1469, leaving his 20-year-old son Lorenzo de’ Medici in charge. This Lorenzo came to be known as ‘the Magnificent’, although his own rule was not without serious challenges.

A second Piero succeeded in 1492. He proved a weaker ruler. In 1494, when war broke out on the Italian peninsula and French troops marched south to assert an old claim to Naples, the Medici were once again expelled from Florence, gaining Piero his nickname: ‘the Unfortunate’. The family were left dependent on their power base in Rome, where during 18 years of exile Piero’s brother, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, rebuilt alliances.

In 1512, the Medici finally retook Florence with the help of the Spanish. This was not a pretty business. Their troops sacked the nearby town of Prato, torturing, raping, and murdering not only rival soldiers but women, children, and priests, “without the slightest pity”. Fearing the same treatment, the Florentines surrendered.

In 1513, Cardinal Giovanni was elected Pope, taking the name Leo X. He was an important patron of the arts. Raphael painted a triple portrait of Pope Leo with his cousin Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and another relative, Luigi de’ Rossi. Leo commissioned Michelangelo to design a funerary chapel for the family. It was needed.

The next years were far from easy. The Medici lost two heirs in quick succession: first Leo’s brother Giuliano, then his nephew Lorenzo. Leo moved quickly to shore up his power in Rome, but no quantity of manoeuvring in the papal court could solve the problem that the Medici faced in 1519: they had no legitimate male heir in the main line, only two illegitimate boys – Ippolito and Alessandro, both under ten – and an infant girl called Catherine, who was excluded from the political structures of the Florentine Republic due to her sex.

The Medici dukes of Florence

Ippolito, the son of a gentlewoman, was legitimised and promoted as a future ruler. But after the Medici were exiled again in 1527, Ippolito’s uncle Pope Clement VII (Leo’s cousin Giulio de’ Medici) opted to make him a cardinal. This meant that when the Medici regained power (again with Spanish backing) it was Alessandro who became first ruler of the city and then in 1532 duke of Florence: the first of the Medici to hold that title.

Alessandro – whose mother was described as “a slave” and “half-Negro” (she had probably worked in the Medici household) – was widely regarded as unsuitable to rule, but he succeeded in winning the favour of the Holy Roman Emperor (and king of Spain) Charles V, whose daughter Margaret he married in 1536.

This alliance with the emperor had an impact, too, on Henry VIII‘s ‘Great Matter’ – his attempts to secure a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Pope Clement was reluctant to alienate his key ally by insisting that Catherine, who was Charles V’s aunt, agree to a divorce.

In 1537, Alessandro was assassinated by a distant cousin, Lorenzino, who claimed he wanted to restore a republic; that, however, did not happen). Instead, another cousin, Cosimo, became duke of Florence. Over the course of a 37-year reign, Duke Cosimo built on Alessandro’s achievements. He conquered Siena, and was granted the title Grand Duke of Tuscany. Alessandro’s half-sister, Catherine de’ Medici, went on to be the first of two Medici queens of France.

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Like his predecessors, Cosimo ran a spectacular, cultured court. Italian mannerist Bronzino’s portraits are testament to the glamour of the Florentine ruling family, while in the Palazzo Vecchio under the supervision of Giorgio Vasari, a series of frescoed rooms glorified the history of the Medici. Cosimo’s successors likewise played host to a range of leading artists and thinkers, including Galileo Galilei, whom his son Ferdinando (so far as he could) protected from the Inquisition, as well as Artemisia Gentileschi, who during the reign of Cosimo II became the first woman to join the Florentine Academy.

The Medici queens

Meanwhile, in France, Catherine de’ Medici had become the single most powerful member of her line. She was married in 1533 to Henry, Duke of Orléans, the second son of the French king Francis II. When Francis’s heir died unexpectedly, Henry stood to inherit the crown – which he did in 1547, as Henry II, with Catherine becoming queen consort. When Henry died in 1559 following a jousting accident, she became a key adviser to her sons.

Her Medici background was not an asset: she was attacked for her mercantile origins and ‘Machiavellian’ courtiers. She was blamed for the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, in which leading Huguenots (Protestants) were killed, and which prompted a wave of religious violence across France. Still, she was not the only Medici queen of France: Marie de’ Medici, wife of Henry IV, also held that title, and ruled the kingdom as regent following her husband’s assassination.

The Medici grand dukes of the 17th century continued with the patronage of arts and sciences established by their forebears, but as Europe’s economic centre of gravity shifted towards its Atlantic ports they became relatively less influential. The main line of the dynasty ended in 1737 with the death of Gian Gastone. His sister Anna Maria Luisa left the family art collection to Florence, ensuring it stayed intact while other great collections were split up and sold off.

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Why are the Medici famous?

The Medici are famous as the ruling family of Florence from the 15th century through until early in the 18th. They made their money as bankers, and became extremely wealthy patrons of the arts. Gradually they shifted from having a leading role within the city government to become the hereditary dukes of the city state of Florence, and then the Grand Dukes of Tuscany.

How did the Medici make their money?

The Medici made their money in the wool trade and banking. They imported wool from northern Europe – including from England and the Low Countries – to Florence, where they processed it into a very refined cloth. Alongside that trade, the Medici were bankers: they lent money to other people and hoped to get a large return on what they had lent out. This mercantile background wasn’t always helpful to their reputation, because a lot of people were quite snobbish about merchants; trade was not an aristocratic thing to do.

How rich were the Medici?

They were on a level with today’s billionaires – that’s the kind of scale that we’re looking at. When Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici died in 1429, he left an estimated fortune of 180,000 gold florins. He wasn’t the richest man in Florence, but he was getting there. The family very quickly become one of the richest in Europe.

When and why did the Medici bank decline?

The Medici bank operated at a time when there are no national banks, so it was lending money to other states and governments.

One their clients was Edward IV of England during the Wars of the Roses. He was a bad risk, but because he was a king, they couldn’t turn him down, particularly because he was also the person who had to agree to their wool exports. Edward didn’t pay back his loans directly. Instead he gave the Medici’s a reduction in their wool tariffs, but this wasn’t the same as actually having cash.

By this point, the Medici bank had branches all over Europe, and a number of other factors came into play, including mismanagement at the branch in Bruges and wider economic problems. As such, over the course of the 15th century the Medici became much more dependent on holding offices within the city of Florence – and the patronage possibilities this provided – rather than making their money privately as merchants.

How many Medici popes were there?

There were two major Medici popes in the early 1500s: Pope Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici), who was elected in 1513, and his cousin Clement VII (Guilio de’ Medici), who was in power from 1523–34.

Later on in the century there were a couple more. One was Pius IV, who was from a very distant branch of the Medici family in Milan rather than the main Florentine ruling family. Then there was Leo XI, a much closer relative, but he lasted less than a month as pope before he died.

How important were the Medici to the Renaissance?

Being magnificent was regarded as a princely virtue, and the ruling families in all the Italian states at this time competed in magnificence via their patronage. This was very much part of showing off their honour, as well as the honour of their state. If a family had aspirations towards nobility, then they would want to host the best festivals, to patronise the best artists and so on. For the Medici that included artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo Buonarroti, and later Artemisia Gentileschi, and scientists like Galileo.

Patronage also meant doing good works for your church. For a family like the Medici – who were involved in a certain amount of dubious political business as well as moneylending, which was still regarded as quite problematic for Christians – endowing your local chapel with gorgeous religious art and educating people who weren’t literate about the stories of the Bible was one way of atoning for your sins.

Were the Medici corrupt?

In the 15th century the Medici absolutely had their hands in the till in terms of the Florentine state. Before they were officially the hereditary rulers of the city, they were borrowing money from the government to fund their own lifestyle.

Over decades the Medici gradually took over the state. Along with allied families, they increasingly manipulated the governing structures by setting up emergency committees and then policing who could be elected to them. They began to appropriate more and more state power for themselves.

Were the Medici as bad as the Borgias – or did they benefit from better PR?

It’s quite difficult to draw a line. Where the Medici had an advantage over the Borgias is that they weren’t foreign; the Borgias were somewhat stigmatised on the basis of being from Spain. In turn, Spain was stigmatised as being home to a lot of Jews and Muslims, and the Borgias were alleged to be too favourable to Jewish people. The Borgias also failed to establish themselves in a state, whereas the Medici succeeded – despite making themselves quite unpopular along the way.

More successful than either of them were the Farnese, who came to power much more discreetly and made themselves Dukes of Parma and Piacenza. We don’t talk about them much now: they’re not as famous because they never became embroiled in controversy in the same way the Borgias or Medici did.

What happened to the Medici? Do the Medici still exist?

The Medici continued to rule in Florence until they ran out of legitimate heirs in the main two lines of the family. At that point, in 1737, a junior line of the family tried to make a claim, but they weren’t regarded as legitimate enough to take over. This branch of the Medicis still exists today.

Catherine Fletcher is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Her latest book is The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance (Bodley Head, 2020). You can also listen to her discuss the Medici in more detail in this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast

This content was first published by HistoryExtra in 2021